Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith

By Mihee Kim-Kort and Rachel Held Evans

God's love for us breaks every boundary. So should our love for each other.

Mihee Kim-Kort is a wife, a mom, and a Presbyterian minister. And she's queer. As she became aware of her queer sexuality, Mihee wondered what that meant for her spirituality. But instead of pushing her away from God, her queerness has brought her closer to Jesus and taught her how to love better.

In Outside the Lines, Mihee shows us how God, in Jesus, is oriented toward us in a queer and radical way. Through the life, work, and witness of Jesus, we see a God who loves us with a queer love. And our faith in that God becomes a queer spirituality -- a spirituality that crashes through definitions and moves us outside of the categories of our making. Whenever we love ourselves and our neighbors with the boundary-breaking love of God, we live out this queer spirituality in the world.

With a captivating mix of personal story and biblical analysis, Outside the Lines shows us how each of our bodies fits into the body of Christ. Outside the lines and without exceptions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781506408972

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Evans

Introduction

Why queer?

More than a decade ago, I went with a good friend to visit a photographer she was checking out for her wedding. I was dressed in my usual T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, with my long hair loose and no makeup. As my friend and the photographer discussed the calendar, I was standing in the waiting room with my back turned to them, looking at the photographs on the wall. At one point, I heard the photographer say to my friend, "Do you want to ask your fiancé if he wants to come and look at these samples?" I turned around and looked at her quizzically. When she realized she had made a mistake, she turned bright red with embarrassment and apologized profusely to both of us.

Though I laughed awkwardly, I was devastated and ashamed, because this misunderstanding wasn’t new to me. I have often felt a disconnect between the internal and external—emotionally, physically, even spiritually—between my internal experience of myself and the way others perceived me as I interacted and connected with them. For a long while, I had experienced the incongruity that what I felt on the inside didn’t always match what people read, saw, interpreted, or understood on the surface of my life.

These days, for the most part, to the world I read cisgender (identifying with the gender that was assigned at birth) and heterosexual. I intentionally fulfilled those scripts in adulthood by getting an education, getting a job, getting married (to a man), having kids, and getting a house. I grew up in the most traditional and conventional Korean immigrant family—Christian, hardworking, morally upstanding, and hardly making any waves. On the surface, I appear to be very clear on my identity, my ministry and work, my faith, and my passions and desires. So why does queerness matter to me?

I have to confess the privileges I have because of my status. I’ve never experienced discrimination, harassment, or violence because of my sexual identity in the way many LGBTQIA people—especially LGBTQIA people of color —have suffered abuse, violence, oppression, prejudice, and persecution. The number of deaths of transgender women of color around the world is increasing every day. As I write this, LGBTQIA youth make up a large percentage of the homeless population across the country, and that statistic increases every day. Queerness matters because it is a matter of life and death.

Growing up, I never made the word queer a part of my vocabulary. It felt like a word that belonged in Shakespearean times, a word that my friends’ grandmothers would use to describe anything strange and peculiar. In high school, I would hear it used interchangeably with gay. People would say, That’s gay! or, Don’t be so queer! to express discomfort and judgment of anything that was strange—especially something that deviated from norms around gender and sexual identity. When said out loud, the word was colored with streaks of contempt. It sounded like a curse word. To be queer was to be undesirable.

Yet, like so much that is dismissed or rejected, queerness found a way to take root and grow. The people who first started talking about queerness didn’t do so in ivory towers. Concepts of queerness came out of flesh-and-blood lives, from broken hearts and crushed spirits, from the ordinary material of everyday life. So it is the streets and neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, parks and playgrounds, courthouses and churches that I’m concerned with in this project. It is where people reside and, in those spaces, how people interact and comprehend one another, reading bodies, lives, and stories.

Of course, concepts of queerness have been explored by scholars, and I am deeply indebted to their work, especially After Sex: On Writing since Queer Theory.[1] As with any theoretical framework, there are limitations to how we can define queerness, and the concept is shifting all the time. Queerness has undergone numerous challenges and transformations. It began as a way to describe certain expressions of sexuality and gender, and now it includes other markers of identity, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, ability, and more. Yes, it’s rooted in matters of gender and sexuality, but queerness is not meant to be exclusionary. In fact, any kind of exclusion would be counter to queerness, because queerness is about bodies, and we all have bodies. We move through this world in our bodies, and we’re constantly interacting with other bodies. This matters.

To me, queerness is three things:

It is a posture. Queerness transgresses boundaries and allows us to simply be, without label or category, specifically around gender and sexuality. Queer is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. It is particular and expansive. It’s less definitive; it does not point to you or me and say, You are queer, but instead makes a wide-open space for all people to find footing in relation to one another and their own lives.

It is playfulness. Queerness is experimenting. It is recognizing the Holy Spirit in our wildest imagination. It makes space for dress-up and acting, pulling out all the pots and pans, banging on the tops, and then running around the house, using them as superhero shields. It is trial and error; it is cannonballing into the waters of definitions of gender and sexuality, splashing water into the face of what is divine and human. It always tends toward a dynamic generosity, a grace that allows for mistakes and failures, because our lives are richer when we hold all of what is human.

Most important, it is practice. Queerness is an ethic. It is a decidedly intentional personal identity, but always, a social and political identity. It addresses the real world, the everyday, and all the struggles inherent inside and outside a person. It is always an act of protest, a revolt, a demonstration, a rallying around people’s humanity and dignity when larger institutions threaten it. It is advocacy. But more than an alliance, it is allyship. That means accompanying people in their journeys through listening, respecting, confronting, standing with, confessing, and being responsible. It means showing up even if you don’t get it or understand it or even agree with it. It means addressing all the bodily realities of people who are daily facing erasure and violence in all its forms—physical, structural, psychic, spiritual, and religious.

All these contexts matter to me, because they mattered to Jesus. Jesus the Christ, the carpenter from Galilee, was viewed as a radical and confronted traditions and institutions. He implicitly and organically lived, ministered, and died in such a way that he was grounded in his context as a first-century Jew yet challenged the racial, sexual, cultural, religious, and economic realities and more around him. He did so with a compelling fervor and creative brilliance, undoing the structures and systems with a mere parable or blessing, a touch or gesture. Finally, he himself was undone on the cross. Jesus acted queerly. Certainly, we could describe his actions as the dictionary definition of queer, strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different. Yet he doesn’t merely act queer. He enacts and embodies queerness. Jesus is queer.

This is why queerness matters. This project is not so much about making Jesus queer but about seeing his queerness, to engage the presence and life of Jesus within the narratives of the biblical texts in provocatively faithful and intimate ways—ways that are fresh and open up the possibility of being. God, in Jesus, is oriented toward us in a queer and radical way. Through the life, work, and witness of Jesus, we see a God who loves us with a queer love. And our faith in that God becomes a queer spirituality—a spirituality that breaks boundaries and moves outside of the categories of our making.

Queerness matters. It is a matter of faith and a matter of spirituality. It matters to people who are trying to live but dying because of who they are and who they love. It matters to me as I struggle to orient myself in this world truthfully. It can matter to anyone, whether we identify with queerness or not, whether it resonates a little or a lot—because whenever we love ourselves and our neighbors with the boundary-breaking love of God, we enact this queer spirituality in the world.

Queerness matters because we need to see all the ways that we ourselves are loved by God, and loved in so many ways. And then we see and feel this in the myriad ways people love each other, which deepens and widens the very love of God in the world.

---

Janet E. Halley and Andrew Parker, After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). ↵

1

On Fire for God

Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.

—Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

I have fallen in love many times.

The first time, I was in the second grade. The boy’s name was Jason, and he had brown hair and brown eyes, asymmetrical dimples that flashed even when he wasn’t smiling. A sprinkle of freckles splashed across his nose. We would say hi to each other first thing every morning and good-bye every afternoon as we stepped onto different school buses. Every time he spoke to me, I felt a little jolt, and dizzy, I would trip on the sidewalk.

One day he asked if he could be my boyfriend. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I accepted, though nothing really changed in our daily routine. We didn’t hold hands or share a kiss. We continued with our daily ritual of greeting each other in the morning and at the end of the day. Then it was over. In fact, I can’t even recall how our relationship officially ended. I have a feeling we both forgot and moved on.

Then I was in the fourth grade, and her name was Alicia. We had just moved to Denver, and I was a brand-new student at school. She lived in the same townhouse complex as my family, and after school and on the weekends, she would come over, or I would play at her house. She had short brown hair, feathered as was the style, and I admired the way it seemed so soft and shiny. She was cool in the way I understood it as an awkward nine-year-old with huge glasses and unruly hair barely tamed by ponytails. She always wore Reebok Pump high-tops with red shoelaces. I convinced my parents to buy me the exact same pair, except with blue shoelaces. Alicia was a natural artist, and we would spend hours drawing and painting, and she would encourage me in my own mediocre attempts.

As with Jason, we never held hands or shared a kiss. We stopped seeing each other when my family moved back to Colorado Springs the following summer.

Five years ago, I wouldn’t have described Alicia as someone I had fallen in love with—maybe a best friend or a kind of sister. But I still remember the butterflies. They were the same butterflies I felt when Jason said good-bye to me every day. They were the same butterflies I felt when my husband, Andy, and I went on our first date and then later when we said our vows on our wedding day. Whenever Alicia stopped by in the mornings so we could walk to school together or when she spent the night, those butterflies always took a little flight in my belly. I remember that fluttery excitement was one I could barely contain. There was a chemistry, an energy and joy.

Those butterflies are powerful. They were—and are—so significant and universal that much has been written about them throughout history. Lengthy books and epic poems center on them. Songs and stories are full of the agony of unrequited love that sent whole countries to war on other shores. Families were torn apart in feuds lasting for generations because of their children’s passion for each other. All because of these butterflies. For you, it may be butterflies, or it might be the feeling of riding on a roller coaster or waking up to Christmas morning every day or looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. There are a lot of ways to describe those butterflies. Sometimes even my stoic father would reminisce in a surprisingly goofy way about dating my mother: "Whenever I saw her, my heart would start pounding hard in my chest—ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom." These stories always made me laugh, but my mother would roll her eyes, embarrassed. Still, I would catch her smile, too; she just couldn’t hide her pleasure at those memories.

I could recount numerous stories, as I imagine you might, too, about that feeling, that desire. While it can refer to wanting, needing, being desperate for some thing—some object, maybe a toy or shiny new iPhone or dark chocolate or that slice of pizza—it especially applies to desire for some one. However we describe the feeling of falling in love—whether it represents some semblance of intimacy, romance, or just even connection—it is powerful enough to prop up entire industries, including books, film, music, and even adult toy stores. This is the phenomenon that makes us alive. It makes us want to sing and shout from the rooftops or run for miles without stopping. Desire has an impact on our bodies. It quickens our hearts; it makes us heat up, with sweat on our foreheads, dripping down our necks, and off our clammy hands; it makes us light-headed and parches our throats. It motivates us, gets us up out of our beds, and drives us forward sometimes to connect, to explore and know, and if we’re somehow lucky, to live and love.

Loving a Desiring God

When I was a college student, I was involved with an abnormally high number of Christian communities. I attended meetings for everything from Navigators to InterVarsity to the Presbyterian Campus Ministry to an Asian American ministry called Little Spark to Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru). It seemed like many of the students around me picked one, maybe two of these as their primary community. But I just couldn’t squeeze myself into one clique. I’ve never felt like I completely belonged anywhere.

The  main  group  that  gave  me  a  way  to  do  ministry as well as have meaningful friendships was Young Life, a nondenominational evangelical ministry to high-school and middle-school students led by college students. While some things in Young Life now give me pause, it gave me one of the most formative seasons in ministry and personal faith. It was one of the driving forces behind why I went into ministry. As nineteen- and twenty-year-olds being trained to do ministry with students a few years younger than us, we were encouraged to immerse ourselves in theology, that is, the language of our faith. A handful of books made the rounds in the group. Lovely spiritual memoirs by Brennan Manning, Bible studies on various books, and classic works including Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest—all these shaped my faith.

One popular book was John Piper’s Desiring God. Honestly, I never fully read it. I pretended I did. When I finally got my hands on it after so many people raved about it, I was entering my senior year in college. Not only was I feeling senioritis and a little of the smug know-it-all attitude that comes with getting ready to graduate and take on the world, my head was stuffed with theories of religion. Philosophies and anthropologies. Social histories and cultural analysis of religion. Parts of my mind were awakening to some glimmering questions around race, gender, sexuality, and Christianity that I struggled to articulate, much less